When you think about it, aren’t we always waiting for food? Sure, our lives are interspersed by other innocuous activities — washing our undergarments under a shower, removing lint from our children’s hair, writing ‘with kind regards’ in an unkind e-mail—but mostly, if we are being honest, we are just waiting to eat.
We wake up and we want to drink or bite something, before lunch we yawn and look at the clock, later in the afternoon, we wonder if we should have a snack or wait for dinner, as we have a drink in the bar we ask the waitress, ‘do you have cheese samosas?”
We can’t do without a microwave at home. And if you are like me, we find ourselves compulsively opening the fridge for no reason at all other than to look in to see if there is food. We might think we eat to live but it seems like we are living to eat.
I was thinking about all these as I — and a small clutch of people — waited for the cooks who were doing koroga at the Nairobi Gymkhana to finish doing their magic in the big pots.
I thought, sure, we are shooting the breeze as we drink but what are we doing once we eat? We will start looking at our watches at some point because food is also a timer on its own.
There was something celebratory about the evening even though there was nothing to celebrate apart from being alive. It being a Saturday, Nairobi Gymkhana was abuzz with various events happening at the same time; weddings, gatherings, and whatnot.
I joined this group of runners for drinks at the invitation of my dentist called Dr Kinoti. [Yeah, my dentist is a cool cat, not those very glum ones who smell onions]. He belongs to a leisure runners club called Runfit.
They are a small community of runners who do not weigh more than 50kgs. Men and women from various professions who do over 100-plus kilometres a week and spend fortunes on the latest running gear and pepper their talk with secret runner phrases.
It’s all very intimidating seeing as my knees cannot sustain even a 10km run nowadays. Frequently they meet for Koroga and have a tipple, naan and something with curry. It is good fun. A gathering of minds.
Koroga is a great concept for lazy Saturday afternoons; cook as you drink. However, you can also hire a cook like they did. There were other groups of people in other bands waiting for their food as they drank.
The world is full of people waiting for food. I bet you are waiting for your next meal as we speak. Enjoy it.
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